Songbook

End of the Road; 2008

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I imagine Woodpigeon founder and frontman Mark Hamilton has a good heart, saw especially exotic animals in clouds as a child, and probably doesn't watch "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!". Listening to the Canadian band's debut Songbook , an earnest bundle of hushed folk-pop, you can't help but picture Hamilton tossing cards into an upside-down empty hat when he's sad. The album's large cast-- human and instrumental-- makes the otherwise tinny songs sound more plush, but its loosely wound orchestration too often feels flimsy.

Sillily enough, Hamilton's first band, which formed in Scotland, went by the moniker Woodpigeon Divided by Antelope Equals Squirrel. Upon returning home to Canada, W/A=S was multiplied by an antelope and deducted a squirrel, leaving him with Woodpigeon, a word he adores and maintains looks like a rollercoaster when written in cursive. This simple, unabashed admiration is apparent throughout Songbook; the eight-member band, which occasionally (and daintily) slurps in additional members to fiddle with lap steels, glockenspiels, and flutes, isn't ashamed to sound pretty.

Amid the piano toddles and chiming bells reside sentiments like "Why must love play games with geography?" and overlapping lines "I listen for your footsteps/ Never come"-- lyrics indicative of Hamilton's admirable skills to keep his melancholy in high spirits. His wistfulness is interrupted with the "Death by Ninja (A Love Song)", a light-hearted lullaby about going to ninja school, then continues on its maudlin way.

Though Woodpigeon's arrangements are more bashful than those of Sufjan Stevens, they have a few things in common. Hamilton is undoubtedly prolific, extracting these 14 songs (even borrowing from "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing", the same hymn Stevens covers for one of his Christmas collections) but writing in his press release that he's got about 100 others waiting to be picked for the next team. Both share a tendency to have the occasional long song title (though Stevens' word count has got Woodpigeon beat 53 to 12 with the second track of Illinoise , which iTunes finds intolerable).

But where Stevens succeeds with lushness and excessive punctuation, Songbook 's lack of cohesion becomes clear in the orchestral arrangements that more often than not dwarf Hamilton's timid voice. Even the band's feathered harmonies feel like more of a crutch than an embellishment throughout. A handful of the songs could have been sheared off to make the album tighter, allowing less room for what sound like haphazard arrangements. To echo the title of their closing track, that was good, Woodpigeon, but you can do better.